In the medical profession, generating bills for services performed on a patient is time consuming. For example, in a typical scenario, a surgeon may perform a procedure on a patient. After the procedure, the surgeon will dictate operation notes or generate handwritten notes regarding what procedures were performed and give these notes to his/her staff. The staff will then attempt to generate billing codes associated with each procedure that was performed. These billing codes may correspond to approved billing codes used by an insurance provider.
Generating bills in this manner is not only costly with respect to the time spent generating a bill, but prone to errors due to multiple parties being involved in generating the bill. For example, the doctor's notes may be poorly organized or presented, may include non-standard medical terminology, and/or may be partially provided in a language other than the primary language of the staff person generating the bill. Still another problem associated with generating bills in this manner is that the doctor may be unable to recall all of the procedures that were performed on the patient.